Grab These IKEA Crates And Turn Them Into Stylish Hanging Porch Decor

Your front porch is the first impression people have of your home. It's a great way to showcase your aesthetic and set the tone for a new season with decor. You can brighten up your front porch this spring with the addition of colorful display flowers, for example. At IKEA, there are a lot of versatile products that can be used for creating the perfect outdoor floral display. One of those items is the KNAGGLIG pine box. These wooden boxes have the open slats of wooden crates and are sold in pieces that need to be built. If you're looking for an easy way to decorate your porch, these wooden boxes give you a lot of versatility. And for this particular project, it's all about using them as a space to showcase flowers or seasonal decorations.

All you need to turn these unfinished wooden boxes into stylish decor is some eye hooks, picture wire, wood stain, and your choice of florals. Since the KNAGGLIG pine boxes are raw wood, there is a lot of flexibility when it comes to personalizing these through color. You can choose any color of stain (or outdoor paint) that you want, including shades of gray, white, or blue. 

In a TikTok video from @cozydiyhome, she transforms two of these boxes into porch decor by staining the individual pieces in a darker shade of brown. After painting on a coat of the stain, wipe off the excess and allow it to dry before flipping the pieces over to do the other side. Let the stain dry completely before putting the box together, following the instructions from IKEA. Once built, attach the eye hooks to the back of each box in the upper corners. After the hooks are on, add the picture wire to the eye hooks so that the boxes can be hung up outside. To hang them on an exterior wall with siding, @cozydiyhome used two siding hooks for each box.

For this project, two boxes were made to be hung one above the other for a stacked look. With these boxes hung up, a pot of flowers is added into each one. You can choose any style of pot for this part of the decor project, although the original DIY used a copper cup as a pot. Hanging these boxes lets you add florals to your porch without them sitting on the floor for critters to get into or knock over. Since the pots just sit in the boxes without being glued down, you can change the flowers out for ones that grow beautifully in containers as part of your porch decor. This lets you customize the look of your porch with seasonal flowers and other items for the holidays.

Using these crates to create adorable decor for your porch is easy once you've put them together. While these pine boxes have a 4.3-star rating with over 2,800 reviews on IKEA's website, there are quite a few that complain about the construction aspect, with a number of customers having issues with either the quality of the included screws or the actual alignment of the holes. In one 1-star review from Juli, she shared, "The [first three] screws went in fine by hand but could not get the [fourth] in, not even with power drill." Another reviewer, Caroline, shared her experience, saying, "The holes are so badly misaligned that proper assembly is impossible ... A screwdriver wouldn't work. We got out our drill and still couldn't make it work." Overall, though, once built, it seems that these are considered very sturdy boxes.

Although the original project has you staining the boxes before putting them together, if you want to skip building them yourself, there is an option to have IKEA assemble the crates for you. However, there is a fee for workers to do this and a minimum purchase requirement as well. Once you have your built boxes, you can still do the staining or painting to make them look the way you want.

It's important to know that even with nothing inside of these boxes, each one weighs 4 pounds and 15 ounces. This means you will want to make sure that whatever hooks you use for this are sturdy and secure, especially once you start adding things into the boxes.